Conversation in the Mountains

" I am supposed to tell you some of the words I heard deep down in the sea where there is much silence and so much happens." So begins the first text in this indispensable volume, which includes: " Edgar Jene and the Dream about the Dream," " Backlight," " The Meridian," and the piece which Celan himself deemed his most important, " Conversation in the Mountains." George Steiner wrote in The New Yorker that Celan's prose was " transforming the landscape of poetic theory and of the philosophy of language." This collection of essays, speeches, letters, as well as notes on Alexander Blok and Osip Mandelstam is a great gift to readers and to anyone who wishes to understand the twentieth century. As the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer wrote, " Paul Celan's poems reach us, but we miss them." Perhaps through these rare prose texts we may find the key to what we missed.